Tracey Emin Unveils Team GB Official Print For Rio 2016

The official limited edition prints for Team GB, at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games have been revealed. The eight artists chosen to make the prints are Tracey Emin, Anne Hardy, Howard Hodgkin, Sarah Jones, Eddie Peake, Benjamin Senior, David Shrigley, and Sam Taylor-Johnson. The artists were asked to create unique images in celebration of Rio and Brazil, with the spirit of Team GB as their inspiration.

Since 1912, prints and posters have been commissioned for each of the Games, creating celebratory and inspiring meetings of art and sport. Building upon a relationship that started in 2012 with Counter Editions creating the Official Prints for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Counter has gone on to produce the official prints for Team GB at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games, and the Baku 2015 European Games.

Tracey Emin CBE and RA Academician (b. 1963, London) lives and works in London. Renowned for her intimate storytelling and autobiographical works, Emin’s art is one of disclosure. Her life events are used as inspiration for artworks that range from painting, drawing, video, and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, painfully honest work that is frequently both tragic and humorous. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, became a Royal Academician, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. During the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, Emin’s survey exhibition ‘20 Years’ opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and then toured on to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (March 19th – June 21st 2009).

Anne Hardy (b. 1970, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. Her practice spans photography, sculptural installation, and audio. Hardy’s constructed environments immerse the viewer in functional yet illusory spaces. Graduating from Royal College of Art in 2000, Hardy is very much a star in the making; recent major solo shows include Modern Art Oxford, Common Guild Glasgow, ICA London, Kunstverein Freiburg, and Secession Vienna. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Barbican Art Gallery, Maureen Paley London and Gagosian New York. Her giant photographic billboards were a highlight at the Hayward Gallery (2014), while her residency at Camden Arts Centre (2011) invited viewers to walk inside one of her huge sets. Hardy’s work is held in numerous international collections including the V&A Museum, London, the Saatchi Collection, London, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Arts Council Collection, London, and the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds.

Sir Howard Hodgkin CBE (b. 1932, London) lives and works in London. One of Britain’s most important painters and printmakers, Hodgkin has received extensive international acclaim. Major retrospectives of his work were presented by the Metropolitan Museum, New York (1995) and by Tate Britain, London (2006). In 1984, Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennial, and was awarded the Turner Prize the following year. More recently, Hodgkin was named the first recipient of the Swarovski Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award (2014). Hodgkin’s abstract paintings are held by most major museums including MoMA, NY, Tate Gallery, London, Metropolitan Museum, NY, British Museum, London, Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, Denmark.

Sarah Jones (b. 1959, London) lives and works in London. Jones’ work is deeply rooted in art history, and draws influence from diverse topics including psychoanalysis, adolescence, and the Victorian period. Jones gained international recognition in the mid-1990s while still studying at Goldsmiths. Her photographs of interiors and her family portraits have been collected by museums including Tate London, V&A Museum London, MoMA San Francisco, Arts Council London, and the Saatchi Collection London. Jones has exhibited at Maureen Paley London, Anton Kern New York and widely at institutions including the National Gallery, London (2013), Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2013), Tate Britain, London (2012), Tate Liverpool (2011), the V&A Museum, London (2007), Reina Sofia, Madrid (1999), and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1998).

Eddie Peake (b. 1981, London) lives and works in London. Eddie Peake’s practice ranges from performance, video, and photography, to painting and sculpture. Peake is renowned for foregrounding sexuality and desire in his work, creating enigmatic spectacles in which both the absurd and the sensual reside. During his Master’s at the Royal Academy in 2013, he rose to fame by staging a naked five-a-side football match at the RA Schools, and created dance performances at Chisenhale Gallery, Tate Modern’s Tanks, London and Performa 13 in New York. More recent projects include solo exhibitions at London’s Barbican Centre (2015) and White Cube São Paulo (2014).

Benjamin Senior (b. 1982, London) lives and works in Greater London. Benjamin Senior’s portraits capture people at rest and play – distilling an energetic movement into a tranquil, serene and classical scene. His subject matter explores the habits of health, relaxation and leisure within a modern lifestyle. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2010, Senior has become a rising star of the British painting scene. Past projects include solo exhibitions at Monica de Cardenas, Milan (2015), James Fuentes LLC, New York (2013), and Studio Voltaire, London (2013).

David Shrigley (b. 1968, Macclesfield) lives and works in Brighton. His comic doodles, sculptures, and anecdotes depict the world as an absurd place. Embracing the obsessions, moral conundrums, preoccupations, and anxieties of everyday life, Shrigley’s art is essentially anti-monumental and whimsical, but inherently sincere. Recent solo shows include the Hayward Gallery, London (2012) and at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2015), which had record-breaking visitor figures. He will unveil his Fourth Plinth commission at Trafalgar Square, London, on September 29th 2016. Titled Really Good, the piece is a ten-foot-tall “thumbs-up” sculpture rendered in bronze.

Sam Taylor-Johnson OBE (b. 1967, London) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Originally a sculptor, Sam Taylor-Johnson began working in photography, film, and video in the early 1990s. Her work has been presented worldwide in numerous group and solo exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1997), where she won the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist and was nominated a year later for the the Turner Prize (1998); a retrospective of her work was also presented at the Hayward Gallery, London (2002).Taking Hollywood by storm, Sam Taylor-Johnson has more recently turned her hand to directing – creating multiple feature-length films such as: BAFTA and Palme d’Or nominated, award winning film Love You More (2008); the BAFTA nominated Nowhere Boy (2009), and the record-breaking blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey (2015).

The official limited edition prints for Team GB at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games will be released on 2nd August 2016, and will be available to buy exclusively from countereditions.com

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